


There'll Be Peace

by give_it_a_little_nudge



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Dean Winchester Deserves to be Happy, Destiel - Freeform, Episode Fix-It: s15e20 Carry On, Episode: s15e20 Carry On, First Kiss, Heaven, M/M, Supernatural Finale Coda, implied Sam/unspecified canonical wife, there'll be peace when you are done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:47:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27674243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/give_it_a_little_nudge/pseuds/give_it_a_little_nudge
Summary: For Michelle.Hardly a fix, more an extension.  Canon-compliant.   I wanted to fix the ending, but I can't, so instead I filled in the gaps of the final episode.**season 15 spoilers
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 14
Kudos: 80





	There'll Be Peace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wiseoldowl72](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wiseoldowl72/gifts).



> What the network did to these queercoded characters is unconscionable, but for my own emotional health, I've chosen to write in peace, not rage. 
> 
> Here's how I digest the ending, especially given the reciprocation offered in the Spanish dubbed version: 
> 
> *Dean entered that vamp hunt with a death wish. 
> 
> *He took the rebar in his back as a well-earned escape route.
> 
> *Running toward death = running toward Cas because he already knows what he's got waiting for him up there. Death isn't the unknown or the punishment in Dean's world that it is for other people. 
> 
> *Dean is finally free to make his own choices, and he did. He chose to let Sam go. He chose Cas. 
> 
> I wanted to honor the amazing work Jensen put in to convey the change in Dean's headspace after he died. His acting was incredible. It felt to me like we could literally see all the weight disappear from his body. I wanted to explore how he wasn't the same man he used to be. I see him as very different now. So this addresses that. All the previous times Dean visited various aspects of heaven or alternate dimensions, he was still a living man with his head rooted on earth. This is different, and I felt like part of what needed to be explored better was how heaven settles into Dean's head and heart and brings him peace.
> 
> I haven't ever considered writing a canon-compliant fic before. I've always compartmentalized canon from AU. And to be clear, I have always been ok with destiel existing exclusively in subtext and in fanfic, that is, until the network made hash trying to please everyone. 
> 
> I feel like the ending was an insult in a lot of ways that I won't go into here in the A/N. But also, the writers left the ending incomplete, and that annoys me outside of the travesty of silenced queerness. Fanfic writers should not be responsible for finishing the actual story. But here we are.
> 
> So, anyway, this is my brain filling in the missing scenes of the half-assed attempt to pretend destiel is not a full reciprocated story that the network gave us. It's an exploration of Dean's headspace, and a closing of the unsaid bits. That's all it is.

Dean peeled out under a warm sun, kicking gravel irreverently behind his tires. The wind in his hair was so familiar and so strange. All of these sensations felt just like he’d known them forever and yet entirely different.

Everything was different.

The burdens, they were gone. The pain. The ache of a thousand hits. How many times had his body hit the dirt? He had no idea. But his body knew. And it had carried the weight of every hurt, the physical, the emotional, the years of taking responsibility for everyone and everything around him weighed upon him. He’d carried it in every step, across his shoulders, in the set of his jaw, in the heft of his step.

And now all that weight was gone.

Gone.

Not buried. Not repressed. Not shunted down into a chute to nowhere out of the expedience of wartime necessity. It was lifted from him entirely, leaving warm sunshine, invigorating wind, cool leather under his hands, loose on the steering wheel.

Loose, not tight. Easy does it with his Baby. No need to treat her harshly when all she had ever given him was shelter.

Dean cranked the volume all the way up and put the pedal down, whooping in delight.

And he drove.

If days passed, he didn’t log them. Some of the landscape he knew, and some of it he felt certain was laying itself before his tires as he met each mile for the first time.

He felt light, easy, blissful in a way he couldn’t begin to describe. He chuckled at the idea of a harp plucking S.O.B. sitting on a cloud and watching the world pass beneath him. This wasn’t that. If this was heaven, then it was built by someone who knew how to throw a world together right. It was built by someone who knew Dean from the tips of his gelled hair to the dusty scuff of his boots, and he smirked.

He smirked. 

And he sang at the top of his lungs, and he raced the wind on an empty blacktop without a pothole or speed trap in sight. Baby, she purred and growled as Dean goaded from her. Her gas tank stayed topped. Her tires gripped the pavement. She sliced through the wind in a way her blocky frame had never achieved down on Earth.

Dean wasn’t lonely, or worried, or anxious. He could feel a warmth in his chest he’d never known, and it told him everything he needed to know. He knew. He smiled, humming, slowing as he approached a bridge in the wilderness. He figured Oregon, if he had to guess, but it didn’t matter much.

He slowed and stopped, blocking the road. He climbed out. The air chilled his face, misty and sharp with pine. The warmth in his chest pulsed, and Dean felt nearly overwhelmed with certainty. There was nowhere else he needed to be. Nowhere but right here. It was beautiful. He could see traces of creation in every aspect of the landscape before him. He wondered beatifically if those calling cards had always been there and he only now acquired the lenses to see them.

Dean leaned on the railing of the bridge, running his hands along the metalwork, smiling softly more with his eyes than his mouth. It felt good. It felt…peaceful. Not the forced perspective peace of a Djinn dream. Not the manufactured smile he used to paste on to hide his fear from Sammy. Not a filtered, muted, blurry vision from some dick-angel who had no idea what peace was actually all about, cobbled together from a formula of pie, classic rock, and half-assed two-dimensional fake mannequins wearing the faces of his friends. No. This place. It reverberated with an authenticity that could hold no matter how many silver blades or holy water splashes he threw at it. He didn’t need to do that to know, though. His chest. It told him everything. No delusion could feel like this.

He felt happy. Astoundingly, satisfyingly, permanently, irrevocably happy.

The warmth in his chest brightened. Dean didn’t have to turn to know his brother was there. He knew. Just as he could point from where he now stood out across innumerable miles to where The Roadhouse served as a gathering place for many of the people he loved. He could feel them all, name them, see them, be with them instantly in any ways he chose. They were a part of him, and they never left him no matter how far he drove. Distance, it meant nothing here.

“Hey, Sammy,” he said as he turned.

Sam didn’t look a day older than when Dean left him. Time here worked…differently. It was…

It was irrelevant.

Dean couldn’t have begun to measure how long he’d been driving. Offhand, he knew vaguely that some days he didn’t drive at all. Some days he was ten years old, playing catch in the front yard with his dad. Some days he was fifty, sneaking a beer to his nephew. Some days he was thirty-two, dressing the part of Charlie’s handmaiden and breaking laws of physics to secure her army a win…because he could. He could do that. Some days he was old and slow, patiently teaching a fourteen-year-old Bobby to read Japanese.

Sam folded his long legs into the shotgun side of Baby’s long front bench seat, just as he had done a million times before, and Dean revved her hard before gunning it and peeling out with a fishtail and a cloud of smoke.

The warmth in his chest held. And Dean smiled. Nothing he had experienced yet up here in Jack’s heaven was quite as satisfying as showing Sammy around the joint, playing the role Bobby had played for Dean who knew how long ago. Yesterday, maybe? Whatever. It didn’t matter. 

It didn’t matter. Because this place, it wasn’t whitewashed. It was real. If Dean lifted the hood of his car and smashed a knuckle trying to loosen a stiff bolt, that shit hurt. He could bleed and fight and hurt and ache here. But it was altogether different too. The hurts, they didn’t linger. They didn’t burrow down into his soul and twist there and add to the layers and layers and layers of bullshit he used to carry, was forced to lug around like his weathered duffle. It wasn’t that nothing mattered. It was that in a brand-new sense, everything mattered. Everything was equally touched by the magic of this place, and earthly concerns just couldn’t hold.

He laughed a lot now.

The warmth in Dean’s chest pulsed. He knew. 

He never worried about when it would happen. Because it would happen. He knew. Dean smiled a private smile, but Sam snickered, proving he could still read his brother. 

“When did you turn into a fourteen-year-old girl,” Sam teased.

Dean chuckled and checked his wing mirror. Habit. There was nothing back there to worry about. “I could do that, Sam,” he pointed out, “but I wouldn’t want to scar you.”

“Yeah, spare me, please,” Sam returned without heat. The lightness in his body spoke volumes. It looked good on Dean’s gargantuan brother.

“I met your girl, you know,” Dean told him. He sneaked a sly look across the bench seat. “She’s something else.”

Sam blushed and lowered his eyes with a soft, private smile of his own. “You should’ve seen her, Dean. First time I saw her, she had four werewolves bearing down on her. They didn’t give her a single moment’s trouble. Four silver bullets. Four headshots. Four dead werewolves. I never believed in love at first sight before that. But she was…she was something else. Texas girls, man.”

Dean grinned wide and cranked the volume up. “Dude! I’m so fucking proud of you,” he shouted over the radio. Sam laughed, threw his head back, and sang.

They drove for miles. The sun sank behind them. It did that sometimes, Dean had noticed, but it never seemed to have much to do with the passage of time.

At length, Sam sniffed sharply, an old tell that he had something on his mind. Dean glanced at him. God, the kid was beautiful. Had he always been that handsome?

“So, how is he?” Sam asked nonchalantly.

Dean’s crow’s feet deepened. He nodded to himself. He steered the car onto a perfectly situated pull-off and set her in park. Her gas tank registered full. He lowered the volume on Bon Jovi. He stared out into the darkening night.

“I haven’t seen him yet,” he admitted softly.

“What? Dean, it’s been…decades!”

Dean chuckled to himself. Sam would grow to understand time here eventually. “Downstairs, maybe. It doesn’t work that way here. He’s here with me, Sammy. And it’ll happen when it happens. I can feel him just like he’s sitting in my back seat. And when the…time…or whatever…is right, he’ll be here. Now. Where am I taking you, man? How about a cold one with Dr. Badass himself? Yeah?”

Sam grinned. “Nice try, dude. I’m not as patient as you are. Take me home. I miss my wife.”

Dean mimicked his brother’s grin. “I’ve got so much to teach you, Sam. You’re gonna love this place.” And with that, he steered back out onto the blacktop, driving into the sunrise on a crisp, foggy morning with a V of ducks leading their way.

***************

Dean never worried about when it would happen because he could feel the guy right behind his sternum. He could fucking feel him there. The lightness that had struck him as such a revelation when he first stepped across the threshold of this place, it lingered. It settled into his body like it had always belonged there. And Dean rolled with it, soaked it in, accepted that he deserved joy and connection and peace. He surrounded himself with family and friends, and the little hub that was The Roadhouse drew him back again and again. The more he acknowledged his rightful place here, the more Heaven’s ambience saturated his being. Castiel had been right. Happiness, it’s not in the having. It’s in just _being._ His soul turned out to be as real as the angel had always insisted. And it surged forward inside him, subsuming, consuming, obliterating the broken pieces of his life.

There was a process here that Dean felt no need to question or doubt.

It finally happened on an evening riddled with stars and fireflies. Dean lounged on the hood of his car with a longneck in his hand, staring upward at impossible constellations, when the warmth in his chest pulsed hard. He huffed a stuttered breath.

“Hello, Dean,”

Dean licked his lips and closed his eyes, relishing the familiar sound, the sense of intimate trust, the beauty of a circle fulfilled. Slowly, he turned his head, knowing full well what he would see. He’d already seen this moment a million times. He would always be right here in this exact place, in this exact time, with this man. His Profound Bond.

“Hey-ya, Cas. Took you long enough.” A brilliant smile broke out on Dean’s face, something wholesome and utterly beyond his control.

Cas cocked his head. “Dean, I…”

“Here, man. Catch.” Dean tossed his car keys across the distance, catching the angel off-guard enough to startle as he moved to intercept them. Dean slid off the hood of his car, careful of the rivets of his jeans on her paintjob (because taking care of Baby was always going to be about more than whether or not he could repair her damage), and he landed smartly on his feet. “Let’s get out of here. We should talk.”

“You…you want me to drive?” Castiel frowned.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Dean joked as he climbed into Sam’s seat.

Castiel didn’t take them far, although they might well be sitting on Endor for all Dean knew. Not like it made any real difference. 

Time? Space? Whatever. 

To Dean, the very real events of however long ago – standing paralyzed with terror while Cas found a horrifying way out of the imminent end of everything that had ever mattered, the simplest way out, the only way that had ever worked when evil stood on the brink of victory – felt as fresh as if his ass was still planted on the concrete floor of the bunker’s dungeon. Castiel had chosen to fight evil with love, and that moment would forever be Dean’s “right now” in a way no other moment could touch.

Cas moved awkwardly as he put the car in park. Both men stared straight ahead, out through the windshield before them, out to the miles of dark pines and rugged hills.

It was beautiful.

“I’m sorry I left you, Dean. I didn’t want to. I had to. It was the only way.”

“Yeah,” Dean replied. His voice sounded odd to him, forced, and he wondered idly what that was all about. “No, man, I get it. I do.”

“I never wanted to leave you, Dean.” Cas glanced across the seat, uncertain for some reason that Dean couldn’t fathom. The peace and joy of this place didn’t seem to affect Cas the way it did Dean. Maybe it was the difference in their constitutions. Maybe the angel/human schism played out differently here than it did on Earth. This was Castiel’s home, after all. “Especially not like that.” The look in Cas’ eye. It was worry. Castiel was worried.

Holy hell, the dude honestly didn’t know. 

He didn’t know.

Dean huffed a laugh.

Cas smiled softly, his eyes dropping unconsciously to Dean’s lips as they so often did over the years. “Well, anyway, I’m glad you’re safe. I’m glad you’re happy. That’s all I ever really wanted, you know.”

“That’s a lie, Cas,” Dean reproved. “Thought angels weren’t supposed to lie.”

“Dean, what I told you…what I said. That was never intended to be a mandate to you. I don’t need you to reciprocate. I don’t need that.”

Dean laughed. “I never knew you to be this stupid, Cas. Dude. Look at me.” Dean adjusted his seat, rotated his hips to allow him to lean closer. He put his left hand on Castiel’s shoulder, and he drew close. Cas’ eyes widened. “Just let me say this…” Dean whispered as his breath ghosted over Castiel’s lips.

But he didn’t say anything.

He pressed his lips to Castiel’s, letting his kiss speak volumes.

They talked for ages, there in the car. They kissed a lot too. The oddness of how time and space work up here, they navigated that by ignoring it. Time would forever be irrelevant, and wasn’t that just the sweetest paradox?

In the end, Dean’s vision of occupying heaven like a narrative, “living” a chronology, and running a goddamned roadhouse of his own made Cas smile. Cas let Dean choose everything, right down to building the bar with his own two hands through sweat and busted knuckles. Sometimes, Jack dropped by, bringing with him an aura of unfathomable power and a quirky cheerfulness that drew people to him. Sometimes, angels seemed to be everywhere, and sometimes Dean forgot they existed altogether as he mopped down his bar with a damp rag or hauled a new keg up the back steps. Cas had important tasks under Jack’s authority, but he always came home to Dean.

He was always going to come home. To Dean.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are very welcome.
> 
> I had originally planned not to post this because it's personal, and I have zero wish to add to the fandom rage. I totally get the rage. I believe the criticisms are valid. So valid. But what i need right now is to process. I need to mourn. And for the record, I'm ok with Dean's death in the end. Life is shit, and it robs us of people unexpectedly, unfairly, too soon. It hurts. The ending hurts. The unfairness hurts. Silencing queer voices hurts. I'm not excusing what they did. I'm just grieving.


End file.
